New Christian O’Connell book explores why real connection matters

The Christian O'Connell Show team. Image: ARN

This morning on the Gold Network’s The Christian O’Connell Show, Christian shared details of his upcoming book, Unscript: The Radical Act Of Being Yourself, which explores the importance of genuine connection in our lives.

“It’s about something very dear to my heart, which is about how we connect to each other and what gets in the way to deeper real connection,” O’Connell said.

“One thing I’ve noticed, and I know that you all would have noticed this as well in your own lives, over the last couple of years, we are becoming more and more disconnected.”

“The one thing about why I think radio is a magical media more than TV or anything else, is that radio is about right now. The radio we do and the radio you hopefully like listening to, and we’ve heard this through so many stories from you guys, day in, day out, is it’s a chance to actually drop the performance that most of us do in all of our lives.”

“There was a point before I decided to move to Australian and really change our lives, where I was driving home from a radio show I’ve done four hours. I was stuck in traffic, which was every day in my life in London, and I looked to myself in the rear-view mirror and I looked away because I certainly realised, you actually haven’t said anything for the last four hours that you actually meant.”

“I’d realised I was performing a version of myself, and I think this happens to a lot of us. We’re performing a version of ourselves and it wasn’t just a work, it was starting to creep into my home life as well. I also realised how exhausting it is to keep up this performance of a version of yourself.”

“Social media is great, there’s so many great things about social media, but what it also shows us is a fake version of people. It makes us think that we need to be some perfect version to have connection with other people and the one thing I can tell you is that people are starved of real connection.”

“I’ve written it with one aim in mind that actually it helps you get excited about having better conversations, because our lives are a series of conversations, and how we talk to each other is actually the quality of our lives.”

“It’s how we connect with each other.  The joy of doing radio is that it’s real time connection and its authentic connection.”

Unscript: The Radical Act of Being Yourself is now available for pre-order on Amazon and Booktopia, with the book set to be released in July.